The centuries-long wars with the Saracen, when everything of the East was the enemy, and the subsequent, now over, era of Western ...imperialism, when Eastern cultures were despised by us, have caused a block in European thinking, making it hard for us to acknowledge what we all owe to the East. Two great religions have influenced Europe, we say: Christianity and Judaism, but we scarcely mention Islam, which has been the third. We are the heirs, we claim proudly, of Greece and Rome, but seldom think of the Arabs, the Persians, the Moors, who, through Spain, fed culture into a Europe that was considered a poor and backward place, with a culture far below the dazzling civilizations of the cities of North Africa, Spain, the Middle East, India.LESSATTRIBUTION DETAIL »

If for Americans, at least, the Great War could sometimes be imagined as a brief, quasi-athletic lark, the Second War permitted no... such melioration by the spirit of adolescent optimism. In North Africa alone, the 1st Infantry Division spent more time in mortal contact with the enemy than all the time it spent--forming up, marching, drawing equipment, lining up at the mess hall, training, bitching--in all of the First World War. And on December 7, 1941, the American navy lost in one day more men killed--2008, to be exact--than in all the days of the earlier war. The Second World War, total and global as it was, killed worldwide, more civilian men, women, and children than soldiers, sailors, and airmen. And compared with the idiocies of Verdun, Gallipoli, or Tannenberg, it was indescribably cruel and insane. It was not until the Second World War had enacted all its madness that one could realize how near Victorian social and ethical norms the First World War really was.LESSATTRIBUTION DETAIL »

Both Napoleon and Hitler controlled continental Europe. Neither could defeat Britain so long as she retained her mastery at sea, a...nd for that reason both abandoned their projected invasion of the British Isles. But Britain could not hope to overcome her enemy without the help of major land-powers on the Continent. Spain in the 1800s was the equivalent to North Africa in the early 1940s, sideshows where alone the enemies grappled on land. Both dictators turned to a strategy of economic stranglehold of Britain, in the 1800s by attempting to close all European ports to British, in the 1940s by unlimited submarine warfare. In both wars the dictators invaded Russia to render her powerless so that they could turn all their strength against Britain, and both campaigns had the opposite result, that Russia became a victorious ally who enabled Britain to survive. The analogy breaks only in the attitude of the United States, in the first war a temporary enemy, in the second an incomparable ally.LESSATTRIBUTION DETAIL »

I thought that when they said Atlantic Charter, that meant me and everybody in Africa and Asia and everywhere. But it seems like t...he Atlantic is an ocean that does not touch anywhere but North America and Europe.LESSATTRIBUTION DETAIL »

I know no East or West, North or South, when it comes to my class fighting the battle for justice. If it is my fortune to live to ...see the industrial chain broken from every workingman's child in America, and if then there is one black child in Africa in bondage, there shall I go.LESSATTRIBUTION DETAIL »

A poet can read. A poet can write. A poet is African in Africa, or Irish in Ireland, or French on the left bank of Paris, or white... in Wisconsin. A poet writes in her own language. A poet writes of her own people, her own history, her own vision, her own room, her own house where she sits at her own table quietly placing one word after another word until she builds a line and a movement and an image and a meaning that somersaults all of these into the singing, the absolutely individual voice of the poet: at liberty. A poet is somebody free. A poet is someone at home. How should there be Black poets in America?LESSATTRIBUTION DETAIL »

The frontiers are not east or west, north or south; but wherever a man fronts a fact, though that fact be a neighbor, there is an ...unsettled wilderness between him and Canada, between him and the setting sun, or, farther still, between him and it. Let him build himself a log house with the bark on where he is, fronting IT, and wage there an Old French war for seven or seventy years, with Indians and Rangers, or whatever else may come between him and the reality, and save his scalp if he can.LESSATTRIBUTION DETAIL »

Of all nations the English undoubtedly proved hitherto that they had the most business here. Yet I am not sure but I have most sym...pathy with that spirit of adventure which distinguished the French and Spaniards of those days, and made them especially the explorers of the American Continent,--which so early carried the former to the Great Lakes and the Mississippi on the north, and the latter to the same river in the south. It was long before our frontiers reached their settlements in the West. So far as inland discovery was concerned, the adventurous spirit of the English was that of sailors who land but for a day, and their enterprise the enterprise of traders.LESSATTRIBUTION DETAIL »

You look out from the ramparts of the citadel beyond the frontiers of civilization.... It is but a few years since Bouchette decla...red that the country ten leagues north of the British capital of North America was as little known as the middle of Africa. Thus the citadel under my feet, and all historical associations, were swept away again by an influence from the wilds and from Nature, as if the beholder had read her history,--an influence which, like the Great River itself, flowed from the Arctic fastnesses and Western forests with irresistible tide over all.LESSATTRIBUTION DETAIL »